In this episode I discuss various aspects of the content of our home page feed;

What are your thoughts about the views expressed in this status update below? Should LinkedIn be blocking content and should we have a ‘dislike’ or not business button?

Are you taking the opportunity to engage with your home page stream? These updates are from real people and everyone of them is an opportunity to build better relationships and raise your visibility.

Engagement can be very effective but when does it become counter-productive? Take a look at the list of comments below. What impression are these people creating? Where is line between good conversation/debate and petty arguments that reflect poorly on all concerned?

It seems to me that our homepage are being taken over by the loud and crazy minority. Sensible, mature business people are making the mistake of low activity - possibly because of all the idiots but this actually makes the situation worse!

Is LinkedIn under threat from Facebook?

The second subject this week concerns the future for LinkedIn. The following article by the highly respected sourcing/recruiting expert Jim Stroud really got me thinking about how LinkedIn are so exposed due to their reliance of Recruitment for dealt ⅔rds of their revenue.

We know that LinkedIn is becoming a better social selling tool than a recruiting tool, business owners and sales people are starting to take the place of the recruiters who are leaving, or at least using other tools instead.

But this will not work out well for us unless LinkedIn find a way of becoming significantly less reliant of their Recruiting revenues.

How are they going to do that?

I discuss the options and would love to hear your ideas.

Cool Thing

This week I want to share (excuse the pun) a really useful tool I have started using called ShareLinkGenerator

This is only relevant if you have a blog or write content somewhere other than on LinkedIn. It works in a very similar way to ‘Click to Tweet’ does for Twitter.

By creating a unique share link you can create an option within your copy for a quote to be the headline for a share of that specific page on LinkedIn.

Again it’s another free tool and I have found it very useful.

Update:

Save to contacts hasn’t quite gone yet….for some of us anyway!

LinkedIn AFQ

Question:

One thing that is puzzling me is how I can send a message to someone who is not a first level connection who has commented on one of my Linkedin Longposts or updates without using up my In-Mails.I can’t find a way of doing this without connecting with them which I don’t necessarily want to do at such an early stage of contact. If you can help I would really appreciate it.

Answer:

The way to do is through using group messages, I made a video to explain how;

In response to al the negative press LinkedIn’s CEO gathered LinkedIn staff together to give them a motivational talk, amazingly they filmed it and released it on Slideshare!

They didn’t go so far as to reveal the 7 year plan he refers to but I still have to applaud the openness of sharing this talk.

On a more positive note LinkedIn are running their first advert at the Oscars this weekend to an estimated audience of nearly 40 million.

Narrated by Jeff Weiner himself, the commercial, called "You’re closer than you think," tells the story of when NASA used LinkedIn to look for its next astronaut. The networking website says its data found 3 million users who were qualified to apply for the role.

Save to Contacts has now been retired, the ‘relationship’ tab still shows for first tier connections and anyone you have previously saved (minus the ‘who introduced you’ section) but you can no longer save 2nd or 3rd tier connections. Disappointing but not at all a surprise.

Interview with Joe Pulizzi

The king of content marketing!

You can listen to the full episode here, or simply search for Winbusinessin on iTunes

Cool Thing

This weeks cool thing is a free web tool that allows you to collate content relevant to specific connections for sharing with them via email or LinkedIn message.

The site is called Grapevine6 and this feature is the ‘engage’ feature which can be accessed below;

Sharing highly relevant content is a great way to build trust and this tool makes it really easy.

LinkedIn A F Q

Question - I'm looking to transition into a variety of industries and would like to leave my industry space blank. I see many posts in your Help Forum regarding this issue but I don't see any solutions. Is it possible to leave the industry section blank?

Answer - I understand your frustration but at the moment, it is not possible to leave your industry field blank.

I can assure you though that this is a field that Recruiters are advised to ignore when searching because it is notoriously unreliable. Many people select the wrong industry either by accident or misunderstanding its meaning - for instance an HR Manager in an Accounting firm puts 'human resources' as their industry rather than 'Accounting'.

Recruiters are usually aware of this and therefore avoid the field when searching.

Provided you complete your profile thoroughly and use the correct keywords, I am sure you will be found for the right opportunities, irrespective of industry.

Now that we have passed 100 episodes, I thought it was time to give LinkedInformed a makeover. You will notice we have a new logo and the introduction music is different but more importantly we have a new format for the show.

I will no longer have a specific news section but I will obviously always talk each week about any important events that have occurred, if nothing important has happened I will focus the episode on a specific subject.

This will never be an interview show as such but I do plan to conduct more interviews from now on.

I hope you like the changes.

Main Story

This week I focussed my attention on LinkedIn’s Q4 and full year financial results.

A quick overview

Q4 revenue increased by 34% (vs 2014 Q4) to $862m and that brought the full year to $2,991.

Talent solutions contributed 62% of revenue (this includes Lynda) compared to 57% last year

Talent solution showed a 32% increase on last year - mainly coming from the field sales team.

When talking about the results I also mentioned a report in the FT about how Glass door may be thinking about competing with LinkedIn.

Cool Thing

This weeks cool thing is a Google Chrome extension called ‘LinkedIn Connection Revealer’

As you can see, this handy tool allows you to see how many followers (not connections) your first tier connection has. I’m not sure why it only works for connections because you can see followers for all LinkedIn users by going to their ‘View recent activity’ but it’s still pretty cool anyway.

Question - I have posted a status update to inform people about my up coming training course. I would like to be able to send a note to specific members of my network to share it. I've had people do it with me but I can't see how. Any tips on how to share it with them?

Answer - Rather annoyingly you can't do it that way for an image update, You are only able to send status updates directly to people if they are web link updates or just font updates. For some reason an image update does not allow this option.

My suggestion would be to produce an update linked to the page that promotes your training event on your website or perhaps Eventbrite and then you will be able to send it to your connections.

I might argue that Charlotte Proudman must have been in one of those top ten lists but she was excluded - maybe for good reason but who else was excluded?

So what do you have to do to get profile views;

Being famous obviously helps!

Laura Chetcuti isn’t famous and her posts are not very well read but she is very active and has 14,000 followers (presumably mostly connections

Ian Moyse (previous guest and LION) has a massive number of connections (33,772 followers) and came in the top ten technology list.

Bianca Miller - not especially well read but fairly active and has nearly 11,000 followers. She managed to get into the Leaders list alongside Richard Branson and David Cameron!

Question

is there a polite way to let people know that you are NOT an open networker / LION?Our marketing strategy has led me to be featured by LinkedIn as "someone you might be interested in following" as part of the on-boarding process of the new app, and this has increased my exposure hugely and I've gone from 3,000 followers (2,500 connections) to 16,000 followers in the last 2 months. Nice. But it also means I get invites from engineering graduates from every corner of the globe.... Can I stop that?

Answer = The best way to deal with this would be to prevent people from inviting you to connect, unless they have your email address.

Go to settings > Communications > ‘select who can send you invitations’

The new social network called beBee (awful name!) that practices ‘affinity networking’ as detailed in this post from the excellent John White.

Episode 100

I really want to do something different for our 100th episode, I am still open to suggestions but one I had recently was that someone (maybe a listener) could interview me! Any volunteers or suggestions as to who would be a good candidate.

I was interviewed this week for Motor Trader Radio. You can listen to the recording here

LinkedIn Publishing. What happens ‘post a post’!

Really interesting and revealing LinkedIn post from LinkedIn top publishing man Daniel Roth about what happens when you press ‘publish’ on your new LinkedIn post.

Key points for me are;

LinkedIn now accept that it’s OK to connect with someone you ‘want to interact with’ rather than insisting you must ‘know them well’.

A post always appears on the home page feed of ALL of your connections presumably at the time it is posted (timing is therefore very important).

An algorithm filters out suspected spam by looking for keywords associated to jobs or events. These posts do not trigger a notification.

Notifications are only posted to ‘strong connections’ determined by leveraging the connection strength score from the LinkedIn cloud service. Cloud service maintains connection relationships between members. This must be based on activities (profile views, messages, post/update/group interactions) and similarities (industry, company, groups etc).

Quoting your post totip@linkedinpulse on Twitter will increase your chances of getting into a channel.

There are now 66 Pulse channels including new country / location ones.

Winbusinessin Podcast

Next Tuesday’s new episode will be covering the 5 essential skills for creating great content;

Writing - People - Video - Audio - Visual

Why not subscribe to the show on iTunes or go to Winbusinessin to listen to the first 2 episodes?

Commentary

Are we lazy or just very reactive with LinkedIn?

Why are LinkedIn users so keen to use canned responses such as ‘great post’ or ‘Congrats on your anniversary’?

I think it looks terrible but that isn’t really my point, I’m more interested in why these messages seem to work so well. Any suggestions please leave a voicemail or email me at mark@linkedinformed.com

Suggested replies (such as I see when using Googles ‘Inbox’ app) are highly effective and useful but LinkedIn’s version seems very crude - yet clearly popular!

Finally I am still keen to gather more ideas for episode 100 (it’s fast approaching). Is there someone you would like me to interview? Perhaps a previous guest or someone who you have heard on another podcast.

The biggest story of the year involved Barrister Charlotte Proudman rebuking a senior solicitor for complimenting her on her LinkedIn profile picture. This story went global and is still being debated by many people today. <pic of Charlotte>

2015 was the year when ordinary LinkedIn users really took to publishing posts.

LinkedIn made a significant attempt to improve groups, upsetting many users, especially group managers in the process

Winbusinessin Podcast

We are now in season 2 of my other podcast which focusses on social selling and business development on LinkedIn. On Tuesday we will be releasing episode 3 which is an interview with Christoph Trappe, a storytelling expert as part of our focus on content marketing.

Why not subscribe to the show on iTunes or go to Winbusinessin to listen to the first 2 episodes?

Commentary

Here are 5 things you can do this year to make 2016 your best LinkedIn year ever!

Refresh your profile.

Perhaps now is a good time to get a new profile picture

Revamp your headline. The new mobile only initially shows the first 68 characters of your headline so consider updating it.

Update your summary to express your goals for 2016, this is a great way to show people that you are actively using LinkedIn.

Produce more content.

Commit to writing more content, either LinkedIn posts or blogs on your own website.